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PennApps 2012 Wrapup

This past weekend Matt Keesan and I traveled down to Philadelphia for PennApps, America’s largest student-run hackathon. 48 hours, 91 teams, 320 hackers, $10K+ in prizes–any way you look at it, the event was huge. So before getting into some of our favorite hacks of the weekend, congratulations to the whole PennApps team, including frontman Pulak Mittal, for keeping the wifi, food, and energy flowing all weekend. AddThis was a proud sponsor and we’re looking forward to next semester!

Advice for solo-hackers-to-be: Vivek worked in high-traffic areas of the hackathon and was accordingly flush with advice and attention from the 40 sponsors at the event. What’s more, he took the advice seriously.

Solo-hacker and UPenn freshman Vivek Panyam won the “most delicious UI” award for Facebook for Grandma, a pared-down Facebook app offering a compelling subset of features in an even more compelling package. Seriously, your grandmother just got 30 clicks closer to your photos; you’ve been warned.

PennApps veterans Devon Peticulas and Dan Mundy won big style points for scoping out and executing on a deceptively simple tamagotchi-inspired pet. Get your own at bbcat.co, then share it with your significant other to either test his or prove your own commitment. What impressed me most about the duo is that at the 11th-hour, when most teams were tracing syntax errors, Devon and Dan were sitting pretty, chatting about node.js design patterns and that perfect shade of beige found on the Atari 800. What’s more, they are coordinating HackRU at Rutgers next month. Maybe they’ll throw us dog-lovers a bone.

Devon Peticulas wears AddThis sunglasses at night. And a Venmo t-shirt for three consecutive days.

Were there an award for the most roguish team at PennApps, the entire UMich contingent would have had to split it. Instead, we gave our own “Most Viral” award to BuddyHack, the only project that was developed, deployed, HackerNews’d, and banned before the demos even began! Luckily the team is prolific and their BuddyMeme project is still up from the Michigan Facebook Hackathon held this March. By creating a dead-simple meme generator (open-sourced, by the way) and leveraging the tight-knit nature of Facebook’s network, BuddyMeme allows memes to thrive within small social groups.

I can has internship? Me and the BuddyHack team.

There were too many cool projects for me to list. AddThis was super happy to share the weekend with so many talented developers.